Guild Wars 2

We know that magic flows out of the leylines. We know that dragons eat that magic. We know that after they eat the magic, the go to sleep and the magic “seeps out” of them back into the world. So where does magic COME from, and where does it ACTUALLY go?

Here’s the chronological order of steps as I understand them:

1. Magic starts in [someplace]
2. Magic pours from [someplace] through the leylines into Tyria
3. Magic builds up in the atmosphere or whatever…
4. Dragons wake up and eat the magic
5. Dragons fall asleep and magic “seeps out” back into Tyria
6. Repeat loop from steps 3-5. Step 2 never actually stops occuring.

So by my count, the elder dragons only gather magic, they don’t reduce it. The magic never actually leaves Tyria. It pours into Tyria and then flip flops locations (atmosphere -> dragon belly -> repeat) within Tyria.

So I’m missing the part where magic returns to wherever it came from before it squirted out of a leyline. Is there a location on another plane of existence from which magic flows through leylines like a conduit? If so, at what point does magic leave Tyria and return to that other plane?

The magic could just be an inherent property of the world, so in that case you could remove step 1. For step 2, perhaps the ley lines are like blood vessels, as in they move the magic around the world. The circulatory system for magic if you will.

The total amount of magic in the world could be the same at all times, just sometimes more of it is stored in dragons and sometimes it is flowing freely.

Moonyeti.3296:

The magic could just be an inherent property of the world, so in that case you could remove step 1. For step 2, perhaps the ley lines are like blood vessels, as in they move the magic around the world. The circulatory system for magic if you will.

The total amount of magic in the world could be the same at all times, just sometimes more of it is stored in dragons and sometimes it is flowing freely.

Hmm interesting thoughts. For that to make sense though, I think magic would have to have some subtle attraction like magnetism or gravity which is causing it to collect at the leylines whenever it isn’t being eaten by a dragon. It floats in the atmosphere and slowly collects at the leylines through static electric cling or something.

However, your scenario doesn’t account for the apparent increase of magic in the world. The whole point of the story is that too much magic is building up in the world and causing it to destabilize, and the elder dragons are supposed to eat the extra magic to calm the world down. If magic is always just there and flows through leylines like blood vessels, then the total amount of magic never changes. You are suggesting a closed system, but I don’ think that’s the case. It looks to me like Tyria is not a closed system at all. It is receiving an abundance of extra energy from an external source we have yet to identify.

Think of it this way. Earth in real life is not a closed system. It receives a TON of energy from the Sun. That is why entropy has not turned Earth into a global lifeless desert. The energy from the sun supports the continued advancement of more and more complex life forms and more complex systems that would otherwise decay into chaos if Earth were a closed system.

If we are to turn real Earth into an analogy for Tyria, it would be like Earth’s Sun is pumping too much energy and causing Earth to burn up, just like whatever source of magic is putting too much magic into Tyria causing it to explode with magicalness.

Maybe Tyria’s Sun is the source of magic? Then maybe it’s not a real star but something else entirely? Are these Elder Scrolls rules or what?

Xenon.4537:

Moonyeti.3296:

The magic could just be an inherent property of the world, so in that case you could remove step 1. For step 2, perhaps the ley lines are like blood vessels, as in they move the magic around the world. The circulatory system for magic if you will.

The total amount of magic in the world could be the same at all times, just sometimes more of it is stored in dragons and sometimes it is flowing freely.

Hmm interesting thoughts. For that to make sense though, I think magic would have to have some subtle attraction like magnetism or gravity which is causing it to collect at the leylines whenever it isn’t being eaten by a dragon. It floats in the atmosphere and slowly collects at the leylines through static electric cling or something.

However, your scenario doesn’t account for the apparent increase of magic in the world. The whole point of the story is that too much magic is building up in the world and causing it to destabilize, and the elder dragons are supposed to eat the extra magic to calm the world down. If magic is always just there and flows through leylines like blood vessels, then the total amount of magic never changes. You are suggesting a closed system, but I don’ think that’s the case. It looks to me like Tyria is not a closed system at all. It is receiving an abundance of extra energy from an external source we have yet to identify.

There is no increase in magic, magic exists like atoms in this world. They combine to form molecules, and they can take all different kinds of forms, but at the end of the day, the amount of atoms remains the same.
This is explored during Asura story, where the lead professor discovers that the magic the dragons eat isn’t lost. The magic is absorbed and corrupted, and is then used by the magic of the dragon to create minions, so it leaks all around in a corrupted form, but it’s still there. When a dragon sleeps, all that magic seeps back into the earth. So in short, the dragon is like a sponge lying on the beach-bed, absorbing water during high tide, and release it out by evaporation during ebb. an endlessly repeating cycle.

But you’re not entirely wrong, tyria isn’t a closed system, but unlike energies, magic is much more confined. It needs an event, a trigger, or other kind of catalysis for magic to enter or leave the system. Think of mist portals, and demons. But not by natural causes.

I like to think of Tyria is a bubble floating in the mists, whose permeable membrane has trapped magic inside, but when there’s enough pressure on either side of the wall, some magic leaks through the membrane in either direction. Which is propably what’s happening now, with 2 elder dragons dead, the stabilized flow of magic is disrupted, and spikes or drops in energy appear where they haven’t appeared before causing new magical anomalies to happen

Whoever said magic comes from anywhere? All indication from everything ever since we learned that Elder Dragons both eat and release magic has been that there is a set number of magic, no increase or decrease in it, it merely changes location from “in Tyria” to “in dragons”.

Magic in the ley lines come from the dragons. Magic in the dragons come from the ley lines. Unless I’ve missed something (if so, please provide source), it’s cyclic, with no intake or outtake.

Xenon.4537:

However, your scenario doesn’t account for the apparent increase of magic in the world. The whole point of the story is that too much magic is building up in the world and causing it to destabilize, and the elder dragons are supposed to eat the extra magic to calm the world down. If magic is always just there and flows through leylines like blood vessels, then the total amount of magic never changes. You are suggesting a closed system, but I don’ think that’s the case. It looks to me like Tyria is not a closed system at all. It is receiving an abundance of extra energy from an external source we have yet to identify.

The idea, as it’s been presented to us, is that the extra magic comes from the dragons, who are never supposed to empty out. Imagine your closed system consists of two containers. One container (representing the dragons put together) can hold almost all of the magic in the system, leaving the other container (representing Tyria) with very little. This is what we’re told happens naturally at the end of a dragon cycle, without bloodstones making it complicated. The Tyria container is smaller, though. It can’t hold all the magic, but luckily, before the dragons are drained out they wake up and reverse the flow again.

Except now we’re killing them. The dragon container is suddenly shrinking, and the magic is being forced into the Tyria container. The pressure is already dangerous, and if the dragon container shrinks again…

it’s not a perfect analogy (bloodstones, Aurene, and the surviving dragons all complicate it somewhat), but it’s more or less the basic idea ANet’s communicated to us. Whether it’s actually true, or whether there’s another piece of information waiting in the wings to change the whole puzzle, is an open question.

It kinda depends somewhat on whether the dragons have literally always been here – meaning that the Elder Dragons either predate Tyria or were created along with Tyria – or whether there was a period during which Tyria was Elder Dragon free. If the latter, then either the system can’t be completely closed, or there was something else that existed before the Elder Dragons that sealed magic away.

My gut feeling, though, is that the answer is the Mists. We’re told that Tyria was formed from the Mists, so all of the magic Tyria started with ultimately came from the Mists. We also know that it’s possible for Tyrians to draw power from the Mists, or for entities in the Mists to send power to Tyria. So it’s possible that there has also been a trickle of magic entering Tyria from the Mists.

This comes with the twist that every time a revenant uses a skill, they might actually be making the magic overload problem just a little bit worse…

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Whoever said magic comes from anywhere? All indication from everything ever since we learned that Elder Dragons both eat and release magic has been that there is a set number of magic, no increase or decrease in it, it merely changes location from “in Tyria” to “in dragons”.

Magic in the ley lines come from the dragons. Magic in the dragons come from the ley lines. Unless I’ve missed something (if so, please provide source), it’s cyclic, with no intake or outtake.

the asura personal story does support the theory of a fixed cycle, but it’s not entirely impossible for magic to enter or leave the system, since rytlock took a magical sword into the mists (yes, he came back with it)

“the Seventh Law of Maginamics posits that magic cannot be created or destroyed”

Source: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic

So it seems like what you are all suggesting is that the leylines aren’t what I thought they were? they aren’t pouring out magic from somewhere? They are more like sediment layers where magic “settles” after it seeps out of the dragon?

I guess I had this theory in my head that the leylines are similar to stars in the Elder Scrolls series. In that universe magic comes from a place called Aetherius. The Sun itself and all the stars in the sky are actually holes in the fabric of Oblivion through which magic pours like a fountain and radiates into the mortal world.

My head-canon was that maybe leylines are like cracks in space/time through which magic is leaking, and eventually it has to leave Tyria and return to Underworld or the Mists in a grand cycle. But I suppose that’s wrong?

It’s unclear what exactly leylines are, but it’s safe to say they aren’t cracks in reality. The devs have compared them to both rivers and air currents, but either way, they’re just channels through which magic naturally moves around in Tyria, and not a source of that magic.

It seems pretty clear what the ley lines are. From the very beginning to even now they are solely presented as the flow of magic, like water or wind currents but for magic. The “paths of least resistance” for magic to move through.

This of course means that ley lines change both in size and placement with the ebb and flow of magic in the world and the shifting of landmasses, but that’s what they’ve always been presented to be. And there has never been any suggestion otherwise.

What’s unclear is merely the exact makeup or composition of ley lines, and why there’s minor visual differences (some are prismatic, some are blue/green, some are yellow/golden). Though Taimi had presented them to basically be “all Tyrian magic merged together”.

@Drax: Just because the Elder Dragons didn’t always exist doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t entities or objects which could have housed magic before them. I’m thinking of either entire races of dragons we have hinted as existing in mass in the past, or objects like krait obelisks and bloodstones – these hold magic, thus would act as a separate container for magic but while we do not know what they’re made of, the materials that make them had to come from somewhere.

There is also a the possibility that entities that arrived on the world after its creation came from elsewhere and introduced magic – not too dissimilar to the Six Gods (if not the Six Gods themselves) – and that prior to this moment “all Tyrian magic” could exist in the world without it metaphorically (possibly literally) exploding from overload. Beings such as Koda and the Spirits of the Wild, or Zintl and Ameyalli, or the Great Dwarf (had it actually been an actual god in the past), or Mellaggan (if she isn’t Melandru). As opposed to magic naturally entering the world from The Mists at a regular rate.

@Amaimon.7823: Very true, it is possible to artificially introduce or take out magic from the system, but that wouldn’t mean the system isn’t closed. If you were to take water and ship into outer space (say on a rocket to Mars), that doesn’t make the water cycle of earth an open system where water can be added or subtracted without artificial interference.

The water cycle is a pretty good analogy for how magic seems to work in Tyria given all indication. It’s always present but can differ between being in Elder Dragons (water in clouds), mortal use / artifacts (rivers and streams), or the ley lines, etc. (oceans and rain).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

@Drax: Just because the Elder Dragons didn’t always exist doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t entities or objects which could have housed magic before them. I’m thinking of either entire races of dragons we have hinted as existing in mass in the past, or objects like krait obelisks and bloodstones – these hold magic, thus would act as a separate container for magic but while we do not know what they’re made of, the materials that make them had to come from somewhere.

There is also a the possibility that entities that arrived on the world after its creation came from elsewhere and introduced magic – not too dissimilar to the Six Gods (if not the Six Gods themselves) – and that prior to this moment “all Tyrian magic” could exist in the world without it metaphorically (possibly literally) exploding from overload. Beings such as Koda and the Spirits of the Wild, or Zintl and Ameyalli, or the Great Dwarf (had it actually been an actual god in the past), or Mellaggan (if she isn’t Melandru). As opposed to magic naturally entering the world from The Mists at a regular rate.

That’s pretty much the sort of thing I was thinking about when I said “either the system can’t be completely closed, or there was something else that existed before the Elder Dragons that sealed magic away.”

My gut feeling is that at this point, Tyria’s magic is mostly a closed system, but there is still something of a porosity to it. Magic enters the system when a being from the Mists uses non-Tyrian magic in order to influence Tyria in some manner. Magic leaves when a soul dies and their soul-energy moves into the Mists.

There may also be some ‘natural’ leakage both ways – said leakage, however, is almost insignificant compared to the magic already present in Tyria.

Come to think of it, actually… what if the Elder Dragons are actually responsible for Tyria being in a state where if they’re all killed at once, boom?

Imagine there’s a semipermeable membrane between Tyria and the Mists. When the ‘pressure’ of magic in Tyria is lower than that of the Mists, then magic slowly seeps in from the Mists. When the ‘pressure’ of magic in Tyria is higher, magic slowly seeps out. Not at a rate fast enough to compensate for rapid swings, but over thousands of years, magic would eventually reach an equilibrium.

Now, consider the effect of the dragons concentrating all of Tyria’s magic inside themselves. This means that our hypothetical membrane isn’t feeling any pressure from the magic that the dragons have contained. So if we imagine that the equilibrium pressure is somewhere close to the trigger point for the dragons to awaken again… this could mean that over the majority of Tyria’s history, magic has been slowly seeping in from the Mists and being consumed by the Elder Dragons, allowing more and more magic to be concentrated in the Elder Dragons until it becomes too great for the world to sustain.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

It seems pretty clear what the ley lines are. From the very beginning to even now they are solely presented as the flow of magic, like water or wind currents but for magic. The “paths of least resistance” for magic to move through.

Of course. The trouble is that the two analogies used, wind and rivers, have very different implications. Most of note for this conversation, if ley lines are rivers, that would imply they have at least one source and at least one place where they pool; but if ley lines are winds, it would suggest they’re just a static volume moving around without a source or destination.

Most likely, ANet means they have some of the properties of each, but the question of which properties could wind up very important to our resolution of the Elder Dragon arc. Thus, “unclear.”

Well ley lines do seem to have a source: the Elder Dragons while they sleep.

If that’s the case, though, isn’t what Scarlet did, redirecting the ley lines to Mordremoth, like making water flow uphill? And if magic is locked in a one-way source -> destination journey, then with the amount of damage it’s causing just passing through the anomaly maps, there might be some catastrophic consequences for wherever it’s pooling; be it through environmental instability, drawing in an Elder Dragon, or, as we possibly saw in Rising Flames, both.

I would definitely agree that if magic pools anywhere, it’d end up being a very dangerous local. Even before Rising Flames, we got the indication that a lot of magic can cause issues (Thaumanova and even the volcanic eruption at the end of Prophecies, likely caused from the, to quote Eve, “power released at the moment the Lich died” which she describes as “incredible. Such a force. It was amazing.”).

But, incidentally, I think that when Elder Dragons wake and begin absorbing magic, if they’re not going to pools of magic, then they’re reversing the flow to drain those “magic pools” from a distance. An ebb and flow of magical currents, if you will, where each last hundreds or thousands of years.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Well ley lines do seem to have a source: the Elder Dragons while they sleep.

I’m gonna nitpick a little and say the leylines have no association with the elder dragons. Rather, the Leylines are just vessels for magic to flow through, they’re dry during the end-game of the dragons, but re-absorb the magic that leaks from the dragons when they go back to sleep. So in the sleep/wake cycle they’re inversily overflowing and drying up.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I would definitely agree that if magic pools anywhere, it’d end up being a very dangerous local. Even before Rising Flames, we got the indication that a lot of magic can cause issues (Thaumanova and even the volcanic eruption at the end of Prophecies, likely caused from the, to quote Eve, “power released at the moment the Lich died” which she describes as “incredible. Such a force. It was amazing.”).

But, incidentally, I think that when Elder Dragons wake and begin absorbing magic, if they’re not going to pools of magic, then they’re reversing the flow to drain those “magic pools” from a distance. An ebb and flow of magical currents, if you will, where each last hundreds or thousands of years.

Actually, I think something to this element is happening. Leyline nodes are essentially pools of magic, but maybe the magic is stable and quiescent in this state. When an elder dragon wakes and sleeps the magic slowly seeps one direction to the other, and then back again. This is a controlled and slow state. When an elder dragon sleeps, the tap is opened and magic slowly poors like water into a glass. But when you kill a dragon, you use a sledgehammer to hit the tap, and then try to fill a glass with it. Yea, that’s gonna overflow, and that water is gonna hit stuff

Amaimon.7823:

I’m gonna nitpick a little and say the leylines have no association with the elder dragons.

If we’re using the river analogy, they do. If all the water in the world is locked up in six massive glaciers, then when those glaciers start to melt, every river is going to have one as its source.

Sure, there might be dried out beds from an earlier age, but a riverbed without any water isn’t a river. A ley-line without any magic isn’t a ley-line. And from our current understanding of the Tyrian magic cycle, only the ley-lines that trace back to the Elder Dragons, one way or another (or maybe a bloodstone), will have magic in them.

Amaimon.7823:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Well ley lines do seem to have a source: the Elder Dragons while they sleep.

I’m gonna nitpick a little and say the leylines have no association with the elder dragons. Rather, the Leylines are just vessels for magic to flow through, they’re dry during the end-game of the dragons, but re-absorb the magic that leaks from the dragons when they go back to sleep. So in the sleep/wake cycle they’re inversily overflowing and drying up.

I’d say that they don’t directly associate with the elder dragons, but they possibly do indirectly. Elder dragons probably prefer to hibernate in places with ley lines, so that they can consume the ley energy when they awaken (we didn’t know about ley lines when we went into Orr, but with all the descriptions of how magical the place was, it probably was a bigger nexus than Lion’s Arch).

Meanwhile, if for whatever reason an elder dragon hibernated somewhere where there wasn’t a ley nexus, it’s possible that one would form there in order to allow the magic released by the sleeping dragon to escape. When the dragon awakens, the region turns from one of positive magical pressure to negative, and the magic starts flowing back in along the same channels it formed on the way out.